Funny that we would spend so much time decorating a space so small, but our bathroom is bathed in love. Kelly and I alcohol-ink painted each of the hundreds of the glass tiles on the walls. The walls that weren't tiled were painted purple with glitter blown on the paint while still wet, which gives it a special glow. Of course, if the walls are purple, shouldn't the shower be glitter painted purple too? And to round it out, we might as well paint the toilet purple too. Kelly got the idea that she wanted a cool glitter toilet seat. After scouring the internet for awhile, and not finding what she wanted, she decided to make her own and got resin, cut up mylar paper, poured it into a mold and made our toilet seat. I've gotta say...it's the most beautiful toilet seat I've ever seen (or sat on)!
On the inside of the bathroom door is a beautiful thing that Cassidy made for me. One Father's Day, she sketched an awesome picture of Jerry Garcia and wrote, in beautiful handwriting, the lyrics to Brokedown Palace. Brokedown Palace is one of my (many) favorite Grateful Dead songs. I used to sing it to the kids as their bedtime lullaby when they were young. When we took Sugaree down to Austin last December to see Dead and Company, we were hanging out after the show, with many of our friends from Dallas, Austin and around the country. Dylan and Neely were sitting on the hood of Sugaree playing guitar and people were coming and going into and out of the bus. At one point, a couple of women got on and were checking out the bus and one looked in the bathroom and then saw Cassidy's Brokedown on the door, and she said we were such a beautiful family and she was so touched by all the love that went into the bus that she was going to send us a Yeti cooler. True to her word, a Yeti cooler showed up at our doorstep and it keeps all of our beverages cold for very long. Turns out, she was Kathleen Seiders, the wife of one of the two Seiders brothers in Austin who founded the wildly successful cooler maker. Thank you Kathleen for that very kind gift.
As we rolled into Austin that December afternoon, as soon as we turned onto the street that takes us to the Irwin Center, we were immediately greeted and flagged over by the Meatball Mafia to park on a grassy traffic island...clearly a place one should not park. The Meatball Mafia is a group of friends from Maine, and they have been on Dead tours for the last 15 years selling meatball sandwiches and other delectable goods to support their Dead addictions. Rhiannon and Stan Durnakowski are a couple of the very cool folks in the group. We had gotten to know the Meatball Mafia the night before at the Dallas Dead & Co show, and when I told one of the Mafiosos that I appreciated him saving us a spot, and he smiled and said, "Oh, it's ok...we figured we'd be safer with another co-conspirator joining us!" We would see them a few days later at the Dead & Company show in New Orleans, a show which was cancelled due to John Mayer's appendix bursting and him having to have an emergency appendectomy. That show was later dubbed the Steal your Appendix show. Our friend from Pennsylvania, Jeremiah Forney was also on that grassy island with us. We met Jeremiah on our way to the Saratoga Springs show in Upstate New York last summer. While I'm driving along to Saratoga Springs, I look over at a van driving next to us and in the passenger seat is a young woman flashing her boobs at us. My my...we got a big laugh out of that unexpected treat! Then, later that evening while we were in the campground jamming on guitar, Jeremiah wheeled up in his wheelchair, and it turns out that HE was driving the van with the flashing boobies. We ended up jamming on guitar, with fire spinners in the background, until the very wee hours.
I started talking about our bathroom, but I digress...
